The Melheimian Sabbatiblog

40 Assassins Sought (Ok, I'll Start the Doctorate...but I need your help)

I've been putting this off for years, but I'm finally going to start my DMin in August. With the green light from my family and the encouragement of my friend Len Sweet out of George Fox in Portland, I'm going to try to put together 15 years of field work into a focused area of study on Leadership in the Emerging Culture with an emphasis on rebuilding the home as church.

The actual title will be Semiotics and the Future. Here' the scoop.

www.georgefox.edu/seminary/dmin/sfs

I'm going to want/need a lot of help from my FINK friends out there and  hope to connect with a whole bunch of you over the next few years to dream out loud together. So...

For those of you heaven-bent on changing the dying mainline before it turns into a flatline...

For those of you hoping to reform your church to look less like the last chapter of American Christianity and more like Deuteronomy 6 (when you lie down and when you rise) meets Acts Chapter 2 (they met in homes for the Apostles' teaching, prayer, care)...

For those of you hoping and praying and working to kill the 240-year-old parentless drop-off spiritual warehouse we call Sunday School before it kills the church...

For those of you wondering and wandering and blundering and pondering what God's up to next in a culture where Jesus is just one more guy among the gods...

I'd be honored to have your heart and brains in on this to help me think, rethink, test, retest, tweak, retweak, and conspire from now until April 2013.

Our first gathering in Portland will be late August, with most of the class work taking place online for the three years. I’ll use Len Sweet and his world-class connections/connectors/sounding board of friends to help polish everything I’ve already done and build a world network of movers and shakers and systems breakers to critique and shape the "every night in every home" movement. There will be an “artifact” rather than a dissertation, and that piece will (hopefully) not be a book or a website but a world-wide network... and maybe a converstation that grows into the first virtual seminary for the home as church.

What I'm looking for is 40 Assassins to be my personal advisors on this with me.

It will take a lot of weapons to execute a system.

Hit me at rich@faithink.com if you'd like to sit in a yurt with me and dream out loud.

Raving Iowegian FINKs

Here's a day brightener that greeted me this morning from a FINK who installed all 8 Faith Stepping Stones at once in her church a couple years back.


On 5/25/10 9:38 PM, "Angie Witmer" <angiewitmer@mac.com> wrote:

Hey, friend.

Hope all is well in Colorado. The photos you posted are fabulous--wish I was there! Unfortunately, I need more than a week's notice to get away. Stink.

I wanted to give you a brief update from my annual job performance review: according to the folks who write up these performance reviews, Stepping Stones and H2H are transforming the church. The reviews all said that they can't imagine life without Stones and are so grateful for all that this program is bringing to Plymouth: new members, new life, new worship services (we started two new family-oriented worship services this year: an Ash Wednesday service and a Holy Week service that were more family friendly that the usual Lenten offerings). On and on and on and on about how life @ Plymouth is more rich, full, and faithful because of H2H and Stones. It was almost embarrassing how folks were carrying on.

So I thought I'd share some of the embarrassing riches of the abundant life @ Plymouth with you. Thanks for bringing it into our lives. Into my life. It really is transformative stuff.

Ang

Lost... and Found without Jesus

It was brilliant.

It was intricate.

It was clear.

It was confusing.

It always kept you guessing.

It usually kept you coming back.

It was the longest-running sermon in television history.

It was all about redemption.

It was all about choices and consequences.

It was all about chance and second chances, and the myriad of alternate possibilities based on those chances.

It was, in the end, all about laying down one's life for one's friends.

It was Lost. 

And also in the end, all of the Lost who laid down their lives for their friends were found.

Without Jesus.

THE 5-MINUTE THEOLOGIAN in me can't help but marvel at a sermon that kept the die-hard faithful coming back, even through the confusion and frustration and complexities. I guess religion does that.

"Lost has been to me what god is to so many other people: salvation," wrote a 19-year-old, in an article to a Dallas Entertainment Blog . "I've learned so much by being interested in all the mysteries of the show. Learned a lot about philosophy, religion, science; and discovered some amazing books."

My kids are 21 and 17. This show, for all purposes, has lasted their entire young aware lives. (2004 to today) In the end, my son and 15 million others chose to gather with friends to watch it, make sense of it, and say goodbye to their much-loved Teacher. It was different than my generation of Boomers gathering to watch  the series finally of MASH. (Hey, we had a party and everyone dressed in Khakis). It was different than the next generation of Busters gathering to watch Seinfeld's inglorious jail-cell non-ending. For this Lost Generation, it was almost like waiting on the mount of ascension with your friends, knowing that this was the end, but that the message would run on and on forever even after the Teacher had ascended into rerun heaven.

The black smoke was transparent all along to the Monday morning quarterbacks. Evil. Demonic. Possessing bodies and either dragging them directly to hell or dragging them season by season through hell. The white light, the living water, the call to take up the cross-less cross of leadership and stay behind to save the Island - while sending your friends to a better place - this, too, was transparent to the Monday morning crowd. All of it happened in front of a world audience. All of it was a Religion 101 course for the new age. To me, a student of the youth faith culture, it was clearly the most brilliant and captivating testimony written to the generic Jesus-less spirituality of our time.

And in the last 15 minutes of the last show of the last season of a seven-year run, the soon-to-be redeemed gathered in a church with a stained-glass window that included religious symbols from the 8 major religions. A little cross was among the symbols. One of eight. Only one of eight. 

A cross. No Jesus. Just a pretty little glowing golden symbol among others.

Whether you're a Ghost Whisperer or an Avatar or a Lost-Junkie, this complicated, Lost Generation is just fine with a little golden cross among other symbols.

As long as it doesn't have a Jesus on it to complicate things.

- RAM

PS - You gotta love the irony of Benjamin Linus, the former head of the Others, sitting on a marble bench outside the church. Yes, he had become much less other-ish through seven seasons. Maybe it was all those head smacks. He sat outside the church, invited in again and again, but was still not  ready to step into the church and, thus, into the light with the others. I suppose he'll sit there for eternity, not quite able to join the other others.

Or maybe he'll become rector of the dead church and get his own show that will run forever on cable.

Talk about Purgatory.

Insanity

"I have never suffered from insanity. As a matter of fact, I have enjoyed every minute of it." - the best quote to come out of Aspen FINKtank 2010

We christened the yurt and were perfectly cozy.

We wondered about a church where the cells are healthy.

We videoed the sunrise through Grandma's Eyes (video to follow when I get home).

We wondered about worship in the post-television world. (Gutenberg vs Google, in a church that hasn't entered the television world but the children have already left it.)

I'm sitting in the Denver airport, on my way to celebrate my dad's 90th birthday in North Dakota. Then, it's on to the insanity of believing that we can reform Christian education from a 240 year old parentless surrogate spiritual mercenary drop-off program into an every night in every home parent-engaged process.

Insane? Maybe. Impossible? Never.

All you really need for an assylum is a big room and the right kind of people.

Here's the quote for the day from Cori Timmerman of Owatonna: "A lot of parents what to raise their kids in the church, but not necessarily in the faith."

A Little Child's Insights

We had a beautiful night at the yurt. Campfire and hot dogs, rain pattering on the roof, and a dozen adults giggling like junior high kids after highs and lows in the dark, followed by complete silence. (And a little snoring 10 minutes later).

The Blogable Story of the day.....

We spent a couple hours tonight talking about the power of sharing the FAITH 5 and Rev. Scott Ness from Grove City, OH told us this one:

He was using Ruth 1:16 with little 4 year old Ethan one night during FAITH 5 time. He just finished reading "your people shall be my people and your God my God..." He told Scott, "Daddy, I don't want your God to be my God. I want your God to be everybody's God."

Aside from that:

My High of the Day

This morning I woke just before sunrise and walked out alone to see the sunrise through Grandma's Eye (the hole in the mountain). 

My Low of the Day

I video taped the whole thing with my little Sony Webcam... and lost the camera on the way back to Aspen during one of the stops along the way.

Aspen FINKtank Great Idea #2: The Dancing Guy

Day 2 of our little soiree in the mountains, and we're talking leadership, the shape of THE church, and what each of our gathered partners needs in the areas of children, youth and family ministry. We're breakfasting now, then it's off over the mountains for a night in the yurt near Grandma's Eye.

Tonight's entertainment will be three questions around a campfire:

    *Three things I wish I knew before I took my current job
    *Three things I’d do different if I were starting all over again
    *Three things I’d like to accomplish before I leave this earth

Speaking of leadership, this is priceless:

Dancing Guy

Aspen FINKtank Great Idea #1: Media Fast

We haven't even started yet our little Aspen FINKtank yet, and we've got the first great idea, complements of Ronnie Naquin of Bethany in Slidell, LA.

Sitting at the long table overlooking an absolutely gorgeous Aspen valley morning, Ronnie pulled out this photo and told us about his little trick to get rid of tech during youth meetings and worship.

When kids walk through the door, they make an "offering" of their phones and all electronic devices in exchange for their time together. Ronnie has found out that his kids - who hail from six different schools - have actually bonded quickly. Though they live in many different areas of the city, they're becoming good friends, sleeping at each other's houses, and getting a lot deeper in their faith lives together.

He got a lot of grief at first, but when the kids found out he was serious, they complied.

Brian Derr gave Ronnie a quick title for what he's doing: Media Fast!

Aspen FINKtank 6

Off to Aspen this morning for our latest FINKtank on the future of the church. A dozen great movers-and-shakers-and-systems breakers are joining me. We're preparing a bunch of video for the future video blog that I hope to start June 1. It's all on the topic of killing the 230 year old drop-off parentless Christian education paradigm before it kills the church. Keep watching all week. I'll try to log some photos and fun.

Here's the last ones we did in the fall when Len Sweet dropped in for a Table Talk.

Songyang's Masters

My godson, Songyang He, graduated from Champaign/Urbana with a Masters in International Finance.

Congratulations can be sent to henanjing@hotmail.com.

Now, to find a good job! If any of you have contacts or ideas on where a wonderful young man who speaks fluent English and Mandarin might start looking, drop me a line.

His father is my good friend, world-class Christian artist Dr. He Qi (www.heqigallery.com), and his mother Yu Hua is a world-class musician Yu Hua.

Any ideas or directions you might send will be much appreciated.

Rich